PC is Valve's home, and at a press event Thursday at its Bellevue, Wash.-based headquarters, the company made that clear in its defense of the platform. The company behind the 15 million user-strong Steam digital distribution service and PC favorites such as Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 went full force to slap down notions that the PC market is in some kind of irreversible turmoil.

"Is there a crisis in PC gaming?" Newell asked during a presentation. "No. But there is a perception problem."

His comments closely mirror those of Kevin Unangst, head of Microsoft's Games for Windows, who expressed almost exactly the same sentiment.

The reason PC backers say that there is a "perception problem" is partly because most of the time, particularly in North America with the monthly U.S.-only NPD retail reports, people aren't seeing the whole PC gaming picture.

Going by the latest annual U.S. NPD results, PC gaming revenue appears to have declined year-on-year to $910.7 million in 2007. But NPD's figures only included boxed retail product, not subscriptions and paid online content, which are growing substantially.

Now that NPD has begun tracking revenues beyond boxed retail product, a clearer picture of the market is being painted. In May, the NPD Group reported that online subscriptions alone generated $1 billion annually.

Newell said that in the next three months, its digital revenue from Valve titles will surpass its retail revenue.

"Only now are organizations such as NPD beginning to track alternative revenue streams (MMO subscriptions, etc.) and discovering billions of previously unacknowledged spending on PC gaming," Newell stated.

And many times, industry watchers focus on only the U.S. and U.K. PC gaming markets, Newell said, although customers in major European markets and emerging markets like China, Korea and Russia are almost solely dedicated to PC, leaving consoles by the wayside.

It's not just missing data or information that have created holes in the PC gaming story, according to Newell.

Read one slide during his presentation headed as "Why isn't this story being told?": "As all of you know too well, the three of the major console holders spend millions of dollars each month on PR teams to seed stories to the contrary."

Newell also said that no one is "taking ownership" in spreading the PC story.

But the multi-company PC Gaming Alliance isn't an integral part of that story, at least as far as Valve's concerned. Asked during a Q&A session why Valve isn't part of the PC Gaming Alliance, he said, "Shipping products is more important than companies sending representatives together to all agree that PC games should be doing better.”

Newell also cited data from the Gartner Group that showed there are over 260 million online PC gamers in the world. Consumers bought more than 255 million new PCs last year.